Losing 33 GB

I just installed another hard drive with a pci card. I got it all setup and it's working great. The only problem is that the drive is a 160 GB drive and I'm only getting 127 GB out of it. I know you lose a little space no matter what but I know it shouldn't be 33 GB. Any ideas on what's going on?

 

What is preventing your drive's full capacity from being seen is the implementation of 48-bit LBA. If the hardware (your motherboard) supports it, and the OS supports it, it may just be a matter of a registry setting, which your drive's manufacturer should probably supply a utility to make sure is enabled. However, in any event, you are only going to see the drive as a maximum of 149GB:

HDD manufacturers say that 160GB is 160,000,000,000 bytes.

Your OS, however, says:
1K = 1024 Bytes
1MB = 1024 K
1GB = 1024MB

So,

160,000,000,000 bytes / 1024 = 156,250,000 KB
156,250,000 KB / 1024 = 152,587.890625 MB
152,587.890625 MB / 1024 = 149.0116119384765625 GB

So, if a HDD manufacturer says 160GB the OS will show that same drive as 149 GB (assuming, of course, your mobo supports 48-bit LBA).

If you are familiar and comfortable with editing the Windows registry:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305098

 

Sorry, that link was for Win2K. This one applies to WinXP:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013

 

you must have SP1 installed on windows XP to enable large drive support... or else you run into the 127GB drive limitation.

 

I've never really edited the window's registry but I'm sure I could do it. It's not that hard to do...I would imagine.

 

Quick question - I don't know if this is the problem (the whole 137 GB deal) because one of the drives I had in my comp before was a 200 GB and I was getting a186 GB out of it.

 

Just do the math in my post above, but use 200,000,000,000 instead, and see what you get.

 

Doing the math I get right on - 186 GB. That's what I'm getting on that drive. The problem is on the new drive that is 160 which I should at least get 149 GB but I'm only getting 127 GB.

Hmmm...

 

do you have SP1 installed?

 

....

 

yep.

 

Ok, set one thing straight for me - is this a drive-by-drive thing? Because I at first thought that it was just a main computer setting and therefore, because my 200 GB drive was running fine at optimum size then, I wasn't sure if that was the problem affecting my 160 GB drive. Does that make sense? ...sorry. That is why I restated my question.

 

I guess all I need to know is if changing the registry keys will screw my comp up...

 

Maybe there's a limitation with the PCI card you say the 160GB is hooked to.

 

So perhaps there's nothing I can do...

 

Well, you know your 200 was being properly seen as 186GB. Can you hook the 160 up to the same IDE the 200 is on and see if it's seen as 149GB? Even if only temporarily, it should tell you whether it's the PCI card or not.